Like Leaves
by Pale Treasures
Summary: A Royal Affair, 2012. Caroline Mathilde and Johann Struensee are both exiled to Germany. They reunite months afterwards. Massively AU. One shot.


**Disclaimer: **I don't own the movie or anything related to it.

**Rating: **K+

**Author's Note:** This is unlikely or just downright impossible. But it had to be written.

* * *

**Like Leaves**

There's mud on the road.

It soaks my dress as I stumble on. It clings to my legs. I can still smell the remnants of rain in the air. They thread through my hair and dampen it. I can feel it as it sticks to my face.

But I feel alive. I am more alive than I have been in months. I feel so alive it hurts.

I am coming to him. It is as though I will see him for the first time. I anticipate the moment, but I can't fully picture it, and I feel all the more grateful for that. I recall that moment after our first dance, my agitation, the way everything changed inside me, in one single swoop, and the look on his face. The agony of realisation. It was as though I was seeing him for the very first time. I imagine it will be like that now. But I don't know. I cherish not knowing.

My heart has never beaten like this. Not even when I was in his arms, not even when I stared into his face and knew that, for a night, he was mine. My heart did not know what loss was truly like. It knows now; it knows what it is like to almost feel it, to sense it as inches so close by, that it is almost like the shiver of a breath on the back of your neck. It is a miracle that we missed the blow; that the pang of the axe failed to struck. We could have lost so much, we could have lost it all. We could have fallen, like leaves.

I am wary of ascribing our good fortune to a broken God. I hesitate to believe that it could have come from the filthy recesses of a man's heart. I do not believe compassion can flower in the dirt. I do not know why it happened. I only know that it happened. It is enough. I am content to voice my thanks to the emptiness.

It did not come without pain. Nothing does. I have lost both of my children. He will not gaze upon his daughter again and marvel at how big she's grown. I will not see my boy again. They will grow far away from me and I can only wonder who will raise them and how. Will they flourish in the filth? Will they forget all that I breathed to them in their sleep? I can only wonder. Perhaps it is best that I forget. But they come to me like dreams in the night. If the years do not take my fears and blunt the memory of them, then nothing shall make me forget.

I am close to him. I can feel it. I am almost there. My heart throbs in my breast. It is pain. It is life. It is the most exquisite, the most breathless sort of happiness there is. No one knows; we have been forgotten. I have passed many months wasting away in obedience, fooling them. I heard nothing from him meanwhile; I can only imagine he has been doing the same. But now, we have been finally and mercifully disregarded. There is no place for people like us in Denmark, in the world. That only makes it belong to us more.

I come to an abrupt halt in the soggy road, with mud almost to my knees. Louise stands back and waits faithfully while I trudge onwards. I close my eyes as the wind rustles through a tree and lifts my hair from my shoulders. I walk a little longer, three steps, five, maybe more.

He materialises ahead, in the empty road, in between the trees. He is exactly as I remembered; perhaps he will only start to change from this moment on.

"Johann," I breathe. The word is as dear to me as my own blood. Johann, Johann, Johann. I rush to him, almost slipping more than once. He catches me in his arms, clutches me to him, so strong he hurts me. I want more of it.

I bury my face in his chest and swallow my tears, but I feel them falling anyway. My heart is emptied finally.

"Caroline," he whispers as though I'm not really there, as though he's talking to the memory of me. My face scrunches as more tears spill. Suddenly, I no longer know how to stop. I wonder if I ever will.

"You're here," I pull back from him and frame his face reverently, running my fingers through his dishevelled hair, caressing him with such breathless hunger that I know I must be hurting him. "You're really here, you're safe."

I saw his death more than once. It came to me unbidden, clearer with each passing day. Thankfully it was only a dream.

Abandon and exile show on every inch of him. I only love him all the more for it. He was forced to bend, but he was not broken. He is alive. He has survived.

"It's alright. You are here now, you are here." His hands are on my face, tangling through my hair. There is no one else. I forget everything. There is nothing easier.

"I thought I would never see you again," I am sobbing now, as if something in me has broken, as if a dam has burst. "I thought they would kill you."

He holds me closer, and everything that I thought I would no longer feel again, the strength of him, the smell of him, the minutest changes in his face as his expression changes, as he thinks, return to me with twice as much power. He is special. I thought so before, I know it now. Nothing can take him so easily. Not the wrath of man or God, not the executioner's axe, not disease or hunger or misery. He is strong. He was strong before me. He will be strong after me. And nothing else makes me so glad that he is mine.

"They have taken my children," I say to him as I struggle to breathe, to be myself again, "Our daughter is lost to us."

His jaw tightens, his eyes cloud over, but he says nothing. It is beyond our power to do anything about it. We have been uncommonly blessed. But we cannot have everything. I saw our child grow up around us in my dreams. But for a dream that is denied, for a pain that is spared, so another must be claimed, a piece of happiness chipped from the heart.

That is the way of the world. It never gives anything all at once and never for long.

"We're together now," he says. "That won't change anymore, not anymore." His words are not a frantic prayer like mine, not any longer. He is himself again, one of the things that I love about him, that made me love him in the first place. He hardens the clay in my heart into bricks. He makes me strong before I cave. "If they have stayed silent so far, then they will leave us alone." The hope in his words is so strong I can almost smell it.

Solitude. Only the two of us. No longer having to hide, to shrink the yawning spaces of a palace, pretending it's a small room with no one else there. There is nothing so sweet. Poverty, want, rain, alienation, I welcome all of it.

Slowly, I breathe for the first time. I feel the air leave my lungs, the strings that bind my chest tight loosen. I close my eyes. His arms swallow me. I am where I belong, finally, I am where I am meant to be.


End file.
